Before the start of the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with one of the leaders of the Crimean Tatar people Mustafa Dzhemilev, assuring him that Moscow would protect the rights of Crimean Tatars, Apostrophe reports.
“When I spoke with Putin by phone four days before the referendum, he also told me how he would make the Crimean Tatars happy, vowed to resolve within a few months all social problems of the Crimean Tatars, and said that Russia was a great country, able to do more within these few months than Ukraine had done throughout the 23-year period of its independence,” Dzhemilev said in an interview with Apostrophe.
